It is Sunday afternoon. My wife is away for a week at a poetry summit in California. No food in the fridge, dishes in the sink, bed unmade. Too much TV. My daughter is engrossed in the music scene of… Read More »The autobiography of a speech coach
Gary Forman is a friend of mine. He’s a great speech writer. He was working on a stump speech for himself. He came over to read it to me and get my feedback. It was fabulous, and so was he, a fierce partisan in… Read More »The Youie Youness of You
Over cigars and Chivas on Sunday night with Dikki Ellis, Michael Christensen and Zach Grenier, we came across an interesting distinction between clowning and acting, and one that is helpful to business speakers. Michael is a Co-Founder of the Big… Read More »The fourth wall or not
I was steered to a web video the other day by an e-mail from a friend, and found myself in a garden of presentation skills coaches (also on video), many of whom quoted research done by Dr. Albert Mehrabian of Stanford… Read More »Scientific research on communication
I just witnessed several clients reading scripts. There was something very unsatisfying about the experience for me. They lacked life and expression. They didn’t appear to mean what they were saying. Yet scripts are often useful and necessary. So what… Read More »Reading a speech vs. giving a presentation
A good speech has a voice. It sounds like an individual—specifically, the individual who is delivering the speech. It should not sound like the speechwriter. And yet us speechwriters are often given only a brief time with the speaker to… Read More »Your speechwriter: How to get the most out of him